Dr. Zach Long // #FitnessAthleteFriday // www.ptonice.com  In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, Fitness Athlete lead faculty Zach Long discusses hip shifting in the squat. Zach emphasizes the need to ensure first and foremost, pain is in the hip or elsewhere in the body is not the cause of the shift. Second, Zach urges listeners to determine if the shift occurs under increasing loads or not. Finally, Zach discusses that if the squat is pain-free and that the movement pattern does not change under load, hip or ankle mobility is the final culprit. Take a listen to the episode or read the episode transcription below. If you're looking to learn from our Clinical Management of the Fitness Athlete division, check out our live physical therapy courses or our online physical therapy courses. Check out our entire list of continuing education courses for physical therapy including our physical therapy certifications by checking out our website. Don't forget about all of our FREE eBooks, prebuilt workshops, free CEUs, and other physical therapy continuing education on our Resources tab. EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION 00:00 - ZACH LONG Hey everybody, welcome to the PT on Ice daily show. It is the best day of the week here on the podcast, and that is Fitness Athlete Friday. I am your host today, Dr. Zach Long. I'm lead faculty inside of the clinical management of the fitness athlete curriculum, teaching in our live weekend seminar, as well as our advanced concepts course. And today we're going to be chatting about assessing the individual that has a hip shift when they squat. what are the questions you should be asking, and what are the things that you should be looking at and programming for them to help address that hip shift in the squat before we dive into that topic. Upcoming courses that we have in the Fitness Athlete Live arena here. November 4th and 5th, I'll be in Hoover, Alabama, and Mitch will be in San Antonio, Texas. November 18th and 19th, we'll be in Holmes Beach, Florida, and in December, Colorado Springs, Colorado. If you can't make it to any of those courses, we are already filling up the 2024 calendar as well. And we have Portland, Charlotte, North Carolina, Boise, Idaho, Renton, Washington, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Fenton, Michigan on the map. So check out all of those courses, as always, at PTOnIce.com. If you want to get registered, learn how to better assess, treat, and help fitness athletes do the movements that they love, as well as how do we get those people that are not already getting their daily dose of physical activity, how do we start to get them involved in that sort of stuff as part of their plan of care when they come to see us for pain? So PTONICE.com there. 02:32 - ASSESSING THE HIP SHIFT All right, today's topic, the hip shift in the squat. What I mean by that is you watch somebody squat, and instead of their weight staying even side to side, you see them shift some of their weight more towards one side than the other. Why does that happen? What are the questions you need to be asking? And then what are the things that you need to be doing as part of their treatment? So I think there are two big questions to ask subjectively when somebody comes to see you for a hip shift or you notice that when you're watching videos or watching somebody actually lift in the clinic. Question number one is, does that individual currently have pain in regions of the body that are impacted by the squat? Question number two is, does that change under load? When you ask and answer those two questions, you'll have a much better idea of what interventions you need to do to help improve that squat pattern. 3 Different Pieces to That 1. If someone is having pain, That's kind of the end of the discussion on the hip shift in the squat. So if somebody comes in and they're dealing with really nasty patellar tendinopathy or they're dealing with an ankle that was just sprained and is very, very sensitive as we dorsiflex th